[mythtv] [Philosophical Discussion] VCDX patch for MythDVD

[raldrich at mac.com]

On Monday, August 25, 2003, at 02:49  PM, Mark Edwards wrote:

> Thor, Isaac
>
> Thanks for committing my patch... In doing this it raised a number of
> questions in my mind that I would like to gauge your opinion on:
>
> 1. Should VCDX go in MythDVD or MythVideo? ( This was an easy one )
> 2. If a user has only a single DVD drive, but still wants to play 
> VCD's, why
> do they need two buttons to push? The answer to this question is that I
> havn't quite figured out how to do an 'autodetect' of the optical 
> media that
> has been inserted - and to then invoke the right player. Problem is, 
> that
> looking at xine and mplayer - doesn't look like those guys have really
> figured it out yet either.
>
> Addtionally, I have a number of movies that are on CD, but they are 
> not a
> standards-based format, they are just single AVI files on an
> ISO9660/(Joliet) filesystem.. It would, IMHO, be ideal if media was 
> inserted
> into the drive (whether it be DVD, CDROM etc) and the play button 
> pressed.
> The software would then be able to pick up whatever media it was and 
> launch
> the apprpriate player whether it be a DVD player, VCD, SVCD, ISO9660 
> AVI,MPG
> etc...
>

IMHO, you shouldn't bother with checking the media type - It's not easy 
(you would have to send commands directly to the drive), and not really 
necessary either.  A better approach would be to simply look at the 
structure of the files/directories on the disk, and launch the 
appropriate player as necessary.  For instance, if there's a "VCD" 
folder on the disc, it's a VCD, if there's a "VIDEO_TS" folder, it's a 
DVD.  This allows the 'weird' formats like mini-DVD (DVD video recorded 
to CD) to work.  If you ignore irrelevant differences (the media type, 
the filesystem format, etc...), and focus on the important differences 
(what is the format of the data recorded on the disc), you'll have much 
better success.

Best regards,

Ron Aldrich